Kosovo's ex-freedom fighter released from jail

January 25, 2019 - 4:09 AM

PRISTINA, Kosovo - A lawyer says the former commander of Kosovo's independence fighters has been released from jail.

Tome Gashi on Friday said Sylejman Selimi, head of the Kosovo Liberation Army during the 1998-99 war, was released by a panel that found "he had been unfairly kept in jail after the Supreme Court decided last year to re-try his case."

Selimi was sentenced in 2015 to eight years of jail for mistreating civilians.

Gashi said Selimi has not been officially summoned by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, set up in 2015 to cover allegations of crimes committed by the KLA's ethnic Albanian members during and after the war.

Earlier this month the court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, started questioning some former Kosovo fighters.